Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

1987

Repetition priming is examined for alternating and nonalternating morphologically related inflected nouns. In Experiments 1 and 2, latencies to targets in nominative and dativellocative cases, respectively, were invariant over case of prime. In Experiment 3, latencies to nominativecase nouns were the same whether the nouns were primed by forms in which the spelling and pronunciation of the common stem were shared (nonalternating) or not (alternating) with the nominative form. Results are interpreted 88 reflecting lexical organization among the members of a noun system. In Experiments 1 and 2, the pattern of latencies to primes suggests a satellite organization in which nominative forms are more strongly linked to oblique forms than oblique forms are to each other. In Experiment 3, atypical cases of alternating forms showed a different pattern of prime latencies, suggesting .that the organization within a noun system may differ for alternating and nonalternating forms.

2015

The aim of this thesis is to explore the Croatian noun inflection classes, with focus on the category of gender. Moreover, the aim is to build a computer model that would be able to induce gender. Since the inflection of nouns in this thesis tackles Computer Science, Linguistics and therefore Cognitive Science, a further aim is to explore cognitive correlatives of the acquisition of inflectional morphology.

2011

This paper deals with the morphophonology of Bosnian nominal declensions. It proposes a new insight into the behavior of the vocalic alternations occurring throughout the system. It is shown that the final vowel of each Bosnian noun results from the combination of three distinct phonological items, and that these items are the exponents of one and only one morphosyntactic property. These exponents are the basic elements of a Bosnian noun and are combined in one complex marker in the phonology. The analyses presented in this paper are consistent with the syntactic approach to word formation of Distributed Morphology (hereafter DM; Embick & Halle 2005, Halle & Marantz 1993). In DM, morphemes are feature-bundles associated to syntactic terminal nodes. In what follows, I propose an interpretation of the mechanism of spell-out, which is the device responsible for the association of phonological form to these feature-bundles. In representing underlying phonological forms, I make use of th...

Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 2002

This article is concerned with the interpretation of noun phrases containing short and long adjectives in Serbo-Croatian. It is argued that the short/long distinction among Serbo-Croatian adjectives correlates with the semantic opposition between the non-specific and specific readings, respectively. The article further investigates the syntactic source of the long inflection, proposing that an AP occupying the Specifier of a nominal functional head will appear with an additional mark, i.e. a long inflection. Finally, the morphological parallelism between the inflection on pronouns and that on adjectives is discussed, suggesting that both are linked to the same nominal projection-possibly DP. KEYWORDS Adjectives, adjectival inflection, DP, (in)definiteness, specificity, Serbo-Croatian.´ (6) a. zelEn-a 'green-FNomSgShort 'z Elen-a: 'green-FNomSgLong ' b. zelEn-o:m 'green-M/NDatSgShort ' zElen-o:m 'green-M/NDatSgLong ' 3. Long inflection and specificity The aim of this section is to show that the short/long distinction among S-C adjectives largely correlates with the [± specific] semantic contrast, rather than with the [± definite] contrast, as often assumed (by,

Departing from an analysis of collective nouns under which they are nouns with a cumulative reference and a count semantic base, but without a uniform atomic level, and hence without a stabile unit of counting, the paper argues that gender, as a near counterpart of classifiers, has a role in specifying the unit of counting. Taking neuter gender in Serbo-Croatian as the absence of gender (Kramer 2009), it is analyzed as a class of nouns which do not morpho-syntactically express the restriction over the unit of counting. In the domain of count nouns, the combination with count semantics yields nouns with non-uniform atomicity. Neuter count nouns are thus argued to be nouns which fail to formally express uniform atomicity, which makes them quantized counterparts of collective nouns (i.e. quantized, non-uniformly atomic). While the non-uniform atomicity does not affect their singular forms, it is argued that neuter nouns in SC are unable to derive proper plural forms, and that productively derived collective forms are used instead. In other words, all neuter nouns in SC effectively have the status of singulatives – in the sense that they are expressions which refer to singularities and establish contrast in grammatical number with collective rather than with plural forms. A range of puzzling empirical phenomena related to neuter nouns is shown to be straightforwardly resolved by this view of the semantic effects of the absence of gender. The paper also includes a discussion of Serbo-Croatian collective nouns, showing that their behavior in respect of number agreement triggered on the finite verb and licensing of reciprocal interpretations are determined by whether they are derived from an existing singular base, and whether they remain within its paradigms. Traditional neuter plurals, argued in this paper to be collectives, are shown to pattern in this respect with the collectives braća ‘brother.Coll’ and deca ‘child.Coll’, as they all belong to the paradigm of their singular bases, and as expected they all require plural agreement on the verb and license reciprocal predicates.

: Inflectional doubletism is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more forms occupy the same cell in an inflectional paradigm. Slavonic languages, with their rich morphological systems, abound in examples of this phenomenon. Croatian, a South Slavonic language, does not differ in that respect. This article looks at one specific example of inflectional doubletism in Croatian: the instrumental singular of the first declension type. There are three families of masculine nouns that allow two endings in this case: nouns ending in the morpheme -ar, nouns ending in a palatal sound and nouns ending in -io. The two endings in question are -om and -em. However, even though both forms are equally possible, they are not used to the same extent. The present study first considers the actual distributions of the two endings in a corpus of Croatian. After that, it reports the results of two questionnaire studies in which sentences with the forms in question were given to native speakers to evaluate. We perform a quantitative analysis to determine whether the intuitions of native speakers mirror the corpus distributions of the respective forms.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

A feature of Croatian and other Slavic languages is a rich inflection system, which does not exist in English and other languages that traditionally dominate the scientific focus of computational linguistics. In this paper we present the results of the experiments conducted on the corpus of the Croatian online spellchecker Hascheck, which point to using non-nominative cases for discovering collocations between two nouns, specifically the first name and the family name of a person. We analyzed the frequencies and conditional probabilities of the morphemes corresponding to Croatian cases and quantified the level of attraction between two words using the normalized pointwise mutual information measure. Two components of a personal name are more likely to co-occur in any of the non-nominative cases than in nominative. Furthermore, given a component of a personal name, the conditional probability that it is accompanied with the other component of the name are higher for the genitive/accusative and instrumental case than for nominative.

2013

The present Master Thesis explores the notion of productivity of inflectional and derivational system in the Serbian language within the Framework of Natural Morphology. The theoretical part encompasses a summary of the most relevant qualitative, quantitative and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of productivity. The main purpose of the Thesis is to investigate productivity of noun and verb microclasses in the Serbian language. A novel classification of nouns- in terms of macroclasses, classes and microclasses, has been proposed in order to account for a much more insightful analysis of the productive patterns. The special focus has been placed on the integration of loan words with fitting and unfitting morphological properties. In addition, one entire chapter is dedicated to the productivity in derivation (in general) and in the investigated language (i.e. Serbian). External evidence for the morphological productivity of the established inflectional classes and diminutive fo...

Vilnius University Open Series

The alternations k~c, g~z, and x~s occurring before i in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) noun declension stem from the Second Palatalization of Velars, but are no longer phonologically conditioned. In the dative-locative singular of nouns with nominative in -a, they are favored or hindered by a combination of morphological criteria. In the dative-instrumental-locative plural of masculine nouns, they are almost exceptionless. In the same three cases of neuter nouns they occur more when the noun is directly after a preposition, less when other words intervene between the preposition and the noun, a phenomenon that has not previously been remarked in the literature. We exemplify it with the noun pazuho ‘armpit’.

Glottotheory, 2023

Grammatical cases of nouns are expressed by inflectional endings in Slovak. Therefore, nouns have several word forms, with the nominative considered the basic form. In addition to the endings, in some word forms there are morphophonological changes also in stems. The differences between the basic form and inflected forms are evaluated using the Levenshtein distance. We show that word forms more similar to the basic form occur more often. The category of animacy plays a very important role in the frequency behaviour of masculine nouns. The overall idea of the present paper is to give some insights into phenomena of noun inflection and to test various factors influencing and regulating the overall complexity of expressing certain required morphological information. It seems that word frequency, but also word length plays an important role. Moreover, it is shown that also gender and animacy has to be considered to understand noun declension in Slovak properly.